Untitled.FR11 (17 page)

Swimming up into consciousness, seeing her there, her and Sherry, I love you Mom had been the first thing out of his mouth, brave boy, caught and held by the tight band of sheets across his chest. She wanted to come forward, heal him, hold him. But her hands wouldn’t obey her, the awful cloud about her still. Instead she took a lifeless chair, clutching his fingers, then grasping his right hand in her hand, an inept squeeze. I’m so sorry, she’d said, and she had been in so many ways. And monstrous and self-berating and amazed at her inability to act.

For two days, a frenzy lived and grew inside her. No sleep at night—or, if a little, then light and deceptive. Sherry kept coming back, a deep warm concern in those eyes that had been so cool and dead when they’d first met. The car, the hospital room, Sherry’s hello on the doorstep and her solicitous hugs when just needed, when the demons were about to overwhelm her—these cycled in over and over, the clock a meaningless toy, the sun rising or setting without point. When her friend picked up the folded pink paper on the kitchen table and said something, Katt, in a new build of agitation, couldn’t fix on it until she repeated it. A lecture, Lyra’s lecture. Sacred Abortion its title.

Sherry asked her a question.

“Excuse me?” Ratt said.

“I said,” said Sherry, “is this the same Lyra who lias the cabin with the weird energies?”

“Yes.”

“The one who loosens the earth around her property to let the Goddess breathe more freely?”

“She has a good heart.”

“Hey, this is tonight. Let’s see. Artemis, the role of the church in baby-killing, and women’s sacred right to end pregnancy. Sounds like something I want to hear.”

“No, really, I—”

“Come on, this is your friend. She a good speaker?”

“She’s okay. Lots of passion. Pretty articulate. A book grabs her, she embraces it, chews on its ideas, spits them out. But I’m not really in the mood for—”

“Well, / am,” said Sherry. And against Katt’s better judgment, she let Sherry steamroller her into going. Door locked and out to her friend’s car.

The air was warm, the sky dimming toward dusk. Knots of uncertainty tightened her body, the agitation causing a wave of small shivers to pass through her. Her son lay in a hospital bed, worsening moment by moment, while she rode passively in Sherry’s Accord. She wanted to act. And she didn’t want to act. Her friend Lyra was a doer, a driver, a woman whose body took charge and whose mind was a simple thing indeed. She’d once berated Katt for being a waffler on some trivial matter, a wimp, a wishy-washy can’t-decide sort. And that was true. The mind was a complex thing to her. It was the body’s working out of puzzles which, when closely considered, had multivariate and persuasive sides, some of which couldn’t be reconciled. Ever. The Lyras of the world thought they had everything figured out. But it was they, to her way of thinking, who, for all their talk about being centered in the body, failed to honor the mind in its centeredness, failed to be patient with it, to give it forbearance, to question, to entertain doubts. Instead they forged ahead—did meditation teach them nothing?—the blind embrace of passion translating into little more than a tyranny of feeling over thought.

Katt scarcely noticed the familiar stretch of College Avenue storefronts going by. South of Old Town Square, in the lot behind the Aggie, they parked. A few blocks north of that, near the food co-op, was Healing Pathways, an old home turned now to alternative use. Clusters of women and men, but far fewer of those, stood on the sidewalk. Their crossing Mountain seemed—a trick of timing—to prompt the scattered crowd to coalesce and siphon in.

Tired couches and folding chairs had been pulled into arcs in the carpeted reception area, a lectern pinned into one corner by their scrutiny. Lyra was there, clutching a thin paperback and listening to a short blond woman. Wave at Lyra; wave back and a smile.

This was unsupportable. The churning babbling people about her seemed pasted on the air, not all there. In the babble, she heard tantalizing echoes— mere cuts of sound—of her son’s voice. Conner needed her. He was dying, and she could stop it. She had to stop it.

Katt’s arms hurt, and her jaw. Her shiver escalated, then calmed again.

“You all right?” Sherry said.

She nodded, though she wasn’t. The crowd blurred for her. It felt wrong to be here, a room in some alien space unattached to anything human. But she followed her friend to a folding chair, sat there, hands clasped, the odd buzz of conversation dwindling as Lyra moved to the lectern and people found seats. Breathe deeply, she told herself, blit her breaths, thinking about her son dying in that hospital bed, came quick, furtive, shallow, clenched.

Lyra held up the book. “Ginette Paris,” she said, “a brilliant woman. Her book, The Sacrament of Abortion. We in the alternate community too often ignore politics in an ardent quest for inner peace at the personal level. In so doing, we feed power to our unnatural foes.” Lyra went on in this vein for several minutes, attuning the room to fix on her and setting the stage for the heart of her talk.

Katt yawned, tightening her facial muscles so that it didn’t show. Her frenzy persisted, the soft lamp-lighting here reminding her of her son’s subdued hospital lights at night. Her left knee pumped. She ought to go to him, but she felt trapped by falsely radiant souls, a choir waiting to be preached to. Right after, though, as soon as it was over, she’d urge Sherry out the door, rush them to the car and burst into the hospital. But what if it was too late? What if she’d let it go too long? And if she hadn’t, what if her healing proved no match for her power to destroy?

“Artemis,” said Lyra, a one-word sentence. “Artemis, protectress of women, children, and animals. But also she who brings them death. Through her, we can honor woman as the natural bearer of life, love, and death. Through this so-called pagan figure, we can end-run around the idiocies of fundamentalist Christianity and understand why abortion is not a sin but a sacrament, a power to be lovingly given by women attuned to the natural cycles of the earth.”

Sherry, leaning, whispered, “I like her.”

Katt nodded, a cold sweat banded on her brow. To her frenzy was suddenly added a new anxiety. Lyra knew. Lyra somehow knew. As she spoke, her eyes found Katt’s, locked in, mischief dancing there, then moving on. Strange as it sounded, she’d surely picked up cabin vibes, she knew what Katt had felt and planned there, what even now she carried out. This whole lecture was a ruse, Sherry in on it, Lyra ready to sledge the talk down upon Katt’s head, to come in with her righteous wrath on a fingertip and open up Katt’s secrets to the community in this public forum. Sherry had said something about baby-killing and the church; no great leap from there to son-killing, reeling about, drawing the moral line, condemning her for hurting Conner.

As if anticipating her fears, Lyra blasted the Church for its hypocrisy: “Contraception of any kind was banned, a sin condemned as fornication. But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the poor would abandon babies on church doorsteps, they’d be sent to wet-nurses, the Church would close its coffers after a time, and the babies died, three out of four at the height of this practice. You can throw that at the know-nothing, care-nothing antichoicers next time they gather to deny your rights!” Katt couldn’t tell if Lyra was for or against this baby-killing. But it didn’t much matter. The air hung close and confining, and Katt’s heart was racing. She felt faint, a sudden wash of dull effervescence in her head, wrapped frontward from ear to ear. Lyra was speaking, but the sounds wouldn’t cohere into meaning. And then a knifepoint caught and wedged in, rising up sharply in her chest. She looked at Sherry, who bore that same oh-no expression in her eyes. The room did an abrupt flip, hands snatching at her, someone straddling her and pushing palms sharply downward against the pain in her heart and pressing cold nervous lips against hers, odd except that she’d forgotten to exhale so it made a kind of sense. Pretty Sherry, pain on her face, held Katt’s hand.

Two young angels arrived in a wail of sirens. Strong and assured they were, taping her onto a stretcher, saying soothing ununderstandable words, lifting her weightlessly, easing her into the oddsmelling vehicle, and rambling her closer to her son and his salvation.

The wooziness stayed with Katt through the ambulance ride, the ER entry (Sherry coming in soon after), a quick battery of preliminary tests. When they were assured she wasn’t in any immediate danger, a thick-lidded man decked out in greens wheeled her to a night room and settled her into a bed by the window, a roommate snoring behind drawn curtains. He and another younger man with a smile and an anchor tattooed on one muscular arm took her temperature, her blood pressure, a sample of arterial blood (“This one is gonna hurt,” and it did), and prepped her left arm for an IV. The ER interns had already taped an array of thin monitoring nodes to her torso, and these were now plugged into a flat weighty transmitter pocketed in her gown.

Sherry stood by the window, watching them.

“What floor are we on?” Katt managed.

They told her. It was the same floor Conner was on, but she had no idea how far away he was. “Conner?” This to Sherry.

“I’ll figure out where he is,” her friend said.

The lidded man spoke up. “Don’t be thinking about a walk now. You’re in no condition to go anywhere.”

Then Doctor Bein came in. “Hello there,” he said as if he’d been expecting her. She introduced him to Sherry, whom he acknowledged with a nod. But his hands had begun already to move upon her, the stethoscope settling in and pressing down into circle after circle of skin. She gave him, as he worked, a description of what had happened. A quick look at her retina, the little light blinding. She wondered why he did that and he told her it indicated the health of her arterioles, the tiny branches that fed into the larger arteries.

“You’ve stabilized,” he told Katt. “Coronaries come in all sizes. Yours was small. But even a small one can be serious, or it can be prelude to a larger one. In the morning, I’ll ask Doctor Gestner to look in on you. He’s a heart specialist. He’ll wheel you over for a scan, see what’s happening in there. Fair enough?”

“Yes,” she said.

Katt mapped out hospital corridors in her head. Her boy could be a distant maze away or half a minute’s walk. Either way, she felt an urgency to reach him. Right this second—or this—he could be breathing his last.

If Doctor Bein had examined her heart now, he’d have heard an upswing in its tempo. Katt couldn’t afford that most likely, but she couldn’t help it either.

“How is Conner?” she asked.

“About the same.” He squeezed her hand, a semblance of bedside manner but coolly professional. “The best you can do for him now is to get a good night’s rest. You’ll be given a stabilizer for your heart rhythms, a few pills four times a day. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she lied.

“Good,” the doctor said. “You’re weak, you’ve had a lot taken out of you. Try not to exert yourself. Call a nurse when you have to relieve yourself. She’ll help you to the bathroom.”

“All right, Doctor.”

“Tomorrow, we’ll wheel you in to see Conner.”

Tomorrow might be too late. She felt the tears come and couldn’t stop them. They emerged weak and whiny in a sound she hated but couldn’t halt.

He held her hand. “The nurse will give you something to help you sleep.”

She nodded. She’d be damned if she’d take it. There had to be some way to get to her son. If she died trying, she swore she would do it.

Doctor Bein, his middle-aged face somehow puckish and bright, said good night to her, joked with Sherry about no marathon runs around the corridors, and left.

“Cute guy,” said Sherry. “No rings.”

“He wants you,” Katt said.

“They all do. I’m being more selective these days.”

As Sherry came forward, Katt raised her right hand to accept her handclasp. Sherry glanced around, then lowered her lips to Katt’s, gently kissed her. She tasted like an oven redolent with bread. The kiss broken, Sherry settled a palm upon Katt’s cheek and smiled. “You’ll be okay.”

“You’ve been a good friend,” Katt said. “Better than good.”

“C’mon now. You say that as if you’re going to die.”

“Sorry,” she said. Speech was an effort. Everything was an effort. She didn’t know if she had the strength to carry out her plan, but she must. It had to be there, her summons the one thing needed to prime the pump. “Find out where he is. And bring a magazine, will you?”

“Which one?”

Utne Reader, Rolling Stone, whatever.”

“You got it. I’ll be back in a flash.”

“Don’t hurry.” She meant it. She’d need time. Just as Sherry left and she’d reached inside the folds to touch her left breast, a nurse came in. Katt replaced her hands on the blanket beneath her chin.

“Hi, I’m Brenda. I’m your night nurse. Open up—you know the drill, under the tongue. This white pill is your get-some-sleep one. These tiny yellow ones’ll steady your heart rhythms, prevent arrhythmia.” The thermometer beeped at her. “Looking good. You’ll do fine.” She held Katt’s wrist in her skilled grip. “Pulse is strong. Do you want anything? Need to get up? No? Okay. Here’s some water. Down the hatch.”

Katt took the yellow pills, gulped them down, palming the other, pretending to swallow it.

“You know how to work the bed?”

“Yes.” Leave now, she thought. Go away.

“Most patients never get the rundown.” She proceeded to be sure that Katt was not one of them, going over every button, demonstrating their every nuance of movement, then painstakingly restoring the bed to its initial position.

“Fine, yes fine,” said Katt. And then, miraculously, Nurse Brenda was gone, drawing the ceiling-tracked curtain three-quarters of the way shut.

Katt slid a feeble hand inside her gown, wrapping her fingers about the monitor wires and the nodes taped to her chest. She closed her eyes. The power was weak, barely a dip below the surface. But she stopped trying to push it, calming her breath instead, refusing to entertain thoughts or anxieties, just letting them go and concentrating on an easy inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale, the warm hand around her breast her sole bodily focus. And the energy came, slowly at first, then with more confidence. 1 ler vision deepened. And suddenly, the heart came into view, at once this moist meaty thing and a sacredness akin to self. Her fingers in ghostly touch lightly soothed the moving muscle, following paths into and out of it, bloodflow she’d seen before only in encyclopedias or cartoons. Katt remembered what Doctor Bein had said about the arteries. She lound the pulmonary artery, the big one coming up